literature

Salimah

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Literature Text

Did you know that a single bullet can buy you a meal?

Yes, that is what the life of a man has been reduced to.  A single bland, tasteless meal rapidly losing its heat to this cold and empty air.  I have the lives of twenty men in my bag, here.  How many of them shall live that I may survive?  How many of them shall die?

I have to make each bullet count.  They are life and death out here.

This place...it is so much worse for me than the others.  I can't expect them to understand.  They know me as the child of gods – of a man and woman who gave everything time and time again to stop the Great Hunger from spreading his pall over the world.  They see me as the daughter of heroes.

I see myself as the product of their failure.

My body was made for a different atmosphere, different climes.  My blood is cold, meant for a rich sun to warm and strengthen – I am a relic, an evolutionary dead end here in the great cold death of the earth.  I don't even understand why I'm still fighting.  Why does it matter?  The earth is dead.  The ground lies fallow.  Nothing can grow here; the hydroponics can't last forever and soon....so horribly, horribly soon, the Schutzstaffel will find us and end our struggle themselves.  Perhaps it is my mother's old fire left inside my heart.  Perhaps it is the ancient memories of the sun that stretch back into my mind for lifetimes uncounted.

Sometimes I wonder if this is the greatest blessing my mother could give me or her cruelest curse.  I sleep every night and feel myself warmed by the sun, surrounded by the pounding of many heartbeats, the eternal thrum of life and passion all around me.  It is a glorious, beautiful thing – I don't have the words to describe it.   And then... I wake up.  I wake up in these ragged clothes, in this timeworn pile of blankets, next to a pile of bodies all coiled together for some fleeting sense of warmth.  And I know that the sun is forever lost to me.

Do you know what it's like?  Do you have any idea what it does to me to carry the memory of the sun deep within my belly when all around me there are men, women, children who have never known and will never know its warmth?  What it does to me to look up into the sky and see a cold fingernail of silver light where once cascaded golden torrents?

It is hell.  It is my own, personal hell.

These men, these women, they look up to me for leadership, for guidance.  Salimah they call me.  "Safe."  The name my parents chose.  But I am not safe, and following me is not safe.  I was not made to be a leader.  I was made to forge paths alone.  I was made to be that single footprint in the ash, the wild rambler who tumbles through ruins and wastes to leave a safe map behind.  A safe map and a handful of memories.  

I am going to leave this camp soon.  We will die without some new place to live.  I will find it and I shall lead them back and I will tell no-one of my passing.  If I live, they shall have a paradise.

If I die, they shall have one less mouth to feed.
Salimah introduces herself. This is the beginning of the "Children of the End" Series I've created - a "what-if" scenario to see the results of a setting I created falling to chaos, to see how the children of those characters would react.
© 2011 - 2024 noctalys
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Well paced and eloquently put. Definitely makes one want to read more.